Cognitive Sciences Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for practitioners, researchers, and students in cognitive science, psychology, neuroscience, and psychiatry. It's 100% free, no registration required.

I was at a professional development seminar today, and the presenter, while being interesting and knowing his subject admitted to being nervous and was speaking very fast. I know I do this when I am giving presentations, despite knowing my audience and my subject.

3 Answers
3

I am experienced presenter, my job is to show presentation, organize educations and trainings to different people, with different personality traits in different situation. Until now I collected more the 700 hours of presentation and more then 120 hours of presentation education. In the beginning I had also that problem, but I overcome it by exercise. Now I am complitelly relaxed when present.

In my opinion cause of this is social anxiety in self presentation:
Here is one research, but I am sure you can find several more if you look to literature section.

EDIT: In this case 'fast talking' is indicator of public speaking fear, so you cant using 'public speaking fear' as cause of 'fast talking' because it will be circular definition. Here is a try to explain this in S-O-R paradigm:

I dont know exactly what is happening in brain but I assume that something is happening in girii hippocampy (working memory) which is overloaded with information of judging environment and accomodate presentation, but also have significant role in speech production.

This is an interesting answer, and I agree that evaluation apprehension plays a role, but it still doesn't answer the basic question: why would evaluation apprehension cause fast talking? Why wouldn't it, for example, cause people to slow down way too much to make sure they get everything right?
–
KrystaJul 30 '13 at 13:35

@Krysta Maybe it is two-process model. Task oriented presenters will finish their presentation fast, and people oriented presenters will allocate more working memory on participant reactions. It will be very interesting to check this model experimentally.
–
ICanFeelItJul 31 '13 at 7:56

I suppose an experiment to test this hypothesis would be to take unconfident people and confident people, induce arousal (inject adrenaline), then see how much more quickly they perform the task about which they are confident.
–
NiteCyperNov 22 '13 at 11:49

Why would adrenaline make a difference here? Just to distract them from potential calm that could allow more-rational thinking
–
New AlexandriaNov 22 '13 at 14:38

People with low self-esteem yet are unaroused are not commonly known to speak faster than normal. The asker used the term "nervous" which I had interpreted to mean aroused. Double-checking, "nervous" is not synonymous with unconfident, though they can be closely related.
–
NiteCyperNov 22 '13 at 23:08

It has been disproven that an aroused brain "thinks faster", but an aroused brain perceives time as passing slower. Thus, an aroused speaker would be inclined to believe that they're speaking too slowly and thus speak faster to compensate.
Even outside of oral presentation, I find this tendency to act faster to be evident when I am playing a first-person shooter video-game and my view (and to a more unfortunate extent, my aim) whips about when I'm having an adrenaline rush, and how a scared animal will act similarly.